Emperor of All Maladies
Subtitle: A Biography of Cancer
Edition: First Scribner hardcover edition (3)
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-11
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 571
ISBN-13: 9781439107959
Copyright date: 2010
First sentence: On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, wok up in bed with a headache.
Description: The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.”

The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

--jacket flap
Notes: US / CAN Edition
Table of contents: title: Contents
pagenum: ix; title: Author’s Note
pagenum: xiii; title: Prologue
pagenum: 1; label: One
title: “Of blacke cholor, wihtout boyling”
pagenum: 9; label: Two
title: An Impatient War
pagenum: 105; label: Three
title: “Will you turn me out if I can’t get better?”
pagenum: 191; label: Four
title: Prevention Is the Cure
pagenum: 235; label: Five
title: “A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves”
pagenum: 335; label: Six
title: The Fruits of Long endeavors
pagenum: 393; title: Atossa’s War
pagenum: 451; title: Acknowledgments
pagenum: 471; title: Notes
pagenum: 473; title: Glossary
pagenum: 533; title: Selected Bibliography
pagenum: 537; title: Photograph Credits
pagenum: 543; title: Index
pagenum: 545